The present invention is directed to a system and method for generating reports using computer algorithms that enable the user to provide a means of finding the most suitable fragments of information (lexemes) stored in a library (lexicon) for inclusion in the report, and to prepare the report in a variety of formats.
In the course of their practice, many professionals generate a variety of written reports. Preparing these reports is labor intensive, and this labor is largely redundant if these reports contain passages similar to previously prepared reports. The information in reports is used for a variety of purposes, some of which require elegant language, some permit abbreviations, and some (such as billing) are best performed by abstracting the report into computer code. Because of the incompatibility of elegant language and computer code, abstracting is often carried out by hand, which is both error-prone and inefficient.
The need for a variety of reports is especially true in the field of medicine, which requires practitioners to generate both highly complex reports and extremely detailed billing instruments. To this end, modern word processors have limited capacity to complete a word or simple phrase after a few characters have been entered. Inserting appropriate boilerplate text using a conventional word processor is valuable if the transaction is simple and can be accommodated by handful of suitable paragraphs. However, many professions deal with highly complex scenarios that call for subtle variations of language which might aggregate to millions of phrases which cannot be stored and recalled usefully by a word processor.
Another method for capturing the information produced during a patient encounter for inclusion in a written report is for the physician to prepare the report by hand or use dictation. Report generation using this method may take five to ten minutes per patient encounter, so that the typical half-day clinical session requires at least one hundred minutes of time by the physician, and generates a report that cannot be usefully examined in any detail by computer.
Therefore, there is a need for a computer program that can suggest to the user fragments of information that are appropriate for inclusion in a document wherein the information can be presented in a number of styles, including forms amenable to computerized storage, analysis, and retrieval.